Photo credit: Special invite via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Celebrity birthday extravagances are regularly reported in the news. Why do we even care? We alternately envy or judge these famous folks for their audacious displays. Yet, it’s not as if we can imagine ourselves there celebrating alongside them.

To celebrate their 200^th episode, the cast of Big Bang Theory shared their best birthday bashes. Jim Parson’s partner threw him two parties to mark his 40^th — one in Los Angeles and another in NYC. “I kind of kicked and screamed ‘this is a bad idea,’ and it was the best birthday I ever had,” he said.

Although I am a fan of the show and Sheldon in particular, I didn’t get an invite to either of these events.

But what if the celebs come to us?

Katy Perry was in the habit of inviting a fan on-stage when she sang her Birthday Song (surely that tour is over by now).

Recently I read about Dave Grohl inviting a fan onstage to play drums for the Foo Fighters on the fan’s birthday. But, they’re already a fan-centric band. After all, check out this video made by an Italian town left off the European tour. A thousand people gathered to play Learn to Fly in an effort to persuade the band to visit them — and it worked.

Last year Kenny Chesney opened a national tour with a Nashville concert on his birthday that his Mother came too as well.

Movie stars do it too. For example, Nollywood actress Ini Edo kept her promise to bond more with fans and viewers by showing up at a Galleria to watch her movie with fans — on her 33^rd birthday.

The one that really grabs my attention though? Gary Barlow, the frontman of Take That (a band that was gigantic in my year abroad in Scotland) has offered to attend fans’ milestone birthdays. This comes on the heels of one fan’s successful one-year campaign to have the singer appear at her friends’ wedding. Now, he’s inviting fans to hound him on social media and suggest birthday bashes to crash.

Imagine the twittersphere insanity if someone like Taylor Swift or a 1D band member did the same!